Rockets can’t snooze on early wake-up call

Houston Rockets guard Chris Paul (3) not happy about a foul call in the fourth inning against the New Orleans Pelicans at the Toyota Center on Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2018 in Houston. New Orleans Pelicans won the game 131-112.

Photo: Elizabeth Conley, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer

Alarm clocks, even for those who use them, don’t have hands that reach out and smack people awake. Technically, the Pelicans did not literally hit the Rockets. It just felt that way.

As much as the Rockets spoke about starting from scratch, the theme of Mike D’Antoni’s team dinner address before training camp, the reality that they have gone from a 65-win team to a zero-win team starting over hit home in the season opener well before the Pelicans’ lead reached 29.

Giving up 131 points in the season’s first game, at home, will get a team’s attention.

“There was no reason other than we weren’t quite ready to climb back up the hill we did last year,” coach Mike D’Antoni said. “We’ve got to climb up. We’re not at the top. We’re down at the bottom, like everybody else. I think it was a good — it should be, it better be — a good learning experience.

“We said we’ll find if we have any problems; I guess we do.”

After a preseason in which the Rockets cruised to double-digit leads, healthy portions of humility might be as useful as anything revealed in Thursday’s long video review of the 131-112 loss. When the Pelicans hit the Rockets with speed and force the Rockets’ step-slow (and often mistake-prone) defense could not slow, reality was inescapable, assumptions were defeated.

“It stunned us a little bit,” D’Antoni said. “It was like, ‘Oh shoot, we’re not as good as we thought.’ Yeah, we are. We just didn’t prove it. Now it’s time to pick up the pieces. Everybody starts at zero. It’s the hardest thing for teams like us when you win 65 by doing all the work to get there and then all summer you think you’re at 65. No we’re not. We’re at zero. We just got to get that mentality again.”

The Rockets did know they would be tested to begin the season, opening with the high-powered Pelicans’ offense followed by the spectacle and challenges that come with LeBron James’ Los Angeles Lakers debut before games against the Clippers and Jazz.

After Wednesday, it seemed apparent the Rockets might need to be pushed.

“I don’t mind it,” forward P. J. Tucker said of things so quickly getting difficult. “It kind of gets everybody back on their toes, kind of reminds everybody we still have to go through the process to get back where we were, still have to go through the hardships of the beginning of the season. It’s a new team. We still have to figure it out. It’s all correctable things we’ll work out.”

D’Antoni said the Rockets “panicked” in the first half when the combination of shock and fatigue led to mistakes. A day later, they were not panicking, to the point Chris Paul broke out the adage D’Antoni has often preached to deal with good times and bad, “So what, what’s next?”

“Lucky this isn’t football, this isn’t the Final Four,” Paul said. “We have just a little time to make it right.”

They were so determined to see the bright side, the argument was made they needed to go through the most deflating of opening-night duds. A bad loss is not generally considered a key to winning. The Rockets said it showed there is work to be done, which means the repairs have not happened. But the first step in solving a problem is, even for a team with championship aspirations, to admit the issue exists.

“Maybe we thought it would be maybe easier, maybe the way we want,” center Clint Capela said. “The fact that it went that way is just going to help us out, I think. It’s going to help us out for the next game so we’ll be more alert. It reminds us we still have some work to do to get back to where we were last year. I think we’re going to take it the right way, which means it’s going to help us.

“If we would have won, we wouldn’t have thought about it. Now, the fact that we lost, I think it’s going to be good because we need to be more focused. We have to adjust a little more. I think it’s going to be positive for us. It reminded us we have to build it up, build it back to where we were last year. It’s going to be good.”

That remains to be seen, but a day later, no one seemed in the mood to hit the snooze alarm.

“They’re not complacent,” D’Antoni said. “They were upset (Wednesday) night. They’re not a team that doesn’t care. We didn’t have our legs, the mental energy wasn’t there, we weren’t sharp, weren’t communicating, things we can control. It’s more about getting back up a championship mentality of how we play the game.

“Last year, we started 5-3 and Memphis beat us twice. We had to overcome that. We lost five in a row at some point (in late December) last year. We overcame that. We got some obstacles to overcome, but we have the character. We will.”

Jonathan Feigen has been the Rockets beat writer since 1998 and a basketball nut since before Willis Reed limped out for Game 7. He became a sports writer because the reporter that was supposed to cover the University of Delaware basketball team decided to instead play one more season of college lacrosse and has never looked back.

Feigen, who has won APSE, APME and United States Basketball Writers Association awards from El Campo to Houston, came to Texas in 1981 to cover the Rice Birds, was Sports Editor in Garland before moving to Dallas to cover everything from the final hurrah of the Southwest Conference to SMU after the death penalty.

After joining the Houston Chronicle in 1990, Feigen has covered the demise of the SWC, the rise of the Big 12 and the Rockets at their championship best.